I can here state a few facts only. There are no inscriptions to be found anywhere in India before the middle of the third century B.C. These inscriptions are Buddhist, put up during the reign of A_s_oka, the grandson of _K_andragupta, who was the contemporary of Seleucus, and at whose court in Patalibothra Megasthenes lived as ambassador of Seleucus. Here, as you see, we are on historical ground. In fact, there is little doubt that A_s_oka, the king who put up these inscriptions in several parts of his vast kingdom, reigned from 259-222 B.C. These inscriptions are written in two alphabets--one written from right to left, and clearly derived from an Aramaæan, that is, a Semitic alphabet; the other written from left to right, and clearly an adaptation, and an artificial or systematic adaptation, of a Semitic alphabet to the requirements of an Indian language. That second alphabet became the source of all Indian alphabets, and of many alphabets carried chiefly by Buddhist teachers far beyond the limits of India, though it is possible that the earliest Tamil alphabet may have been directly derived from the same Semitic source which supplied both the _dextrorsum_ and the _sinistrorsum_ alphabets of India. Here then we have the first fact--viz. that writing, even for monumental purposes, was unknown in India before the third century B.C. But writing for commercial purposes was known in India before that time. Megasthenes was no doubt quite right when he said that the Indians did not know letters,[268] that their laws were not written, and that they administered justice from memory. But Nearchus, the admiral of Alexander the Great, who sailed down the Indus (325 B.C.), and was therefore brought in contact with the merchants frequenting the maritime stations of India, was probably equally right in declaring that "the Indians wrote letters on cotton that had been well beaten together." These were no doubt commercial documents, contracts, it may be, with Phenician or Egyptian captains, and they would prove nothing as to the existence in India at that time of what we mean by a written literature. In fact, Nearchus himself affirms what Megasthenes said after him, namely that "the laws of the sophists in India were not written." If, at the same time, the Greek travellers in India speak of mile-stones, and of cattle marked by the Indians with various signs and also with numbers, all this would perfectly agree with what we know from other sources, that though the art of writing may have reached India before the time of Alexander's conquest, its employment for literary purposes cannot date from a much earlier time. Here then we are brought face to face with a most startling fact. Writing was unknown in India before the fourth century before Christ, and yet we are asked to believe that the Vedic literature in its three well-defined periods, the Mantra, Brâhma_n_a, and Sûtra periods, goes back to at least a thousand years before our era.